For twenty years now I have been arguing the obvious: namely, that as early as 1997, the Islamist problem was too big and too lethal for any U.S. intelligence service or law-enforcement agency to defeat. At that time, I suggested to my superiors at CIA that we either get permission to kill Osama bin Laden immediately — and thereby probably shatter or at least drastically weaken a still-developing al-Qaeda — or inform the president that he was facing a quickly growing Islamist enemy that would soon not only would require conventional forces to eradicate, but could not be defeated by any other force or combination of forces. I also said that to believe that the Islamist movement was either limited in its capacity to grow in numbers and spread geographically or was unrelated to the faith of Islam could not be substantiated by fact or logic, and that to tell the American people that was so would be a knowing, and its own right, a lethal lie. This, I hasten to add, took no brilliance to see. It was clear as day in 1997; it is — I think — just as clear today.
Let me say here very directly that whatever the Belgian police and intelligence services are doing in the aftermath of the attacks in Brussels, and whatever assistance is being rendered to them by the United States and their EU partners, will not have the slightest impact whatsoever on the security of Belgium, the EU, the United States, Canada — or farther afield — Australia or New Zealand. Now, the Belgian authorities may well apprehend, indict, try, and convict each and every one of the still living mujahideen who were involved in the Brussels operation. And good for them if they do. But it will do nothing to lessen the Islamists’ military capabilities, destroy their abundant, migrant-expanded networks in the West, or significantly attrit their manpower. Although Western governments have acted — and spoken — for the past twenty years as if killing or capturing the Islamists one at a time was emblematic of pushing the mujahideen ever closer to defeat, it never did and never will make any strategic difference. As I have said many times before, trying to destroy the Islamist movement by killing or incarcerating its members one by one — whether in 1997 or 2016 — would be the same as if the Americans, British, and Soviets had tried to annihilate the Hitler’s Wehrmacht and SS and Hirohito’s Imperial Army and Navy by killing one of their personnel at a time. Only a madman — or a deliberate, dastardly lair — would tell the public that it could.
What the aftermath of the Brussels attack requires is popular recognition that the Belgian and Western intelligence and police services — no matter how successful they are — will have not the slightest impact on the strategic reality that the West, is now, and for at least a decade past, being beaten to death by the Islamists. They have defeated our armies in two wars, they have spread worldwide, they have — despite the lying if condescendingly soothing words of Obama, Biden, McCain, Cameron, Hollande, Clinton, Cruz, the treason that calls itself Neo-Conservative, etc. — very successfully changed the way we live, whether in regard to worrying about where children go for social events, where vacations should be taken, or the all too obvious reality that the civil liberties of Westerners are being incrementally abrogated by their rulers in the name of security; that is, by elected men and women who know that the West is bleeding to death at the hands of Islamist fighters and, even more, by their own voluntary pacts with the six horses of the West’s coming apocalypse: diversity, multiculturalism, political correctness, interventionism, irreligion, and open borders.
Since Brussels, Americans and Europeans have been buffeted by the media’s usual race to distract their audiences from the death sentence their leaders have signed for them. Reporters have been doing their usual breathless pieces on the tracking and capturing of the mujahideen involved in the attack, as if successful cops-and-robbers procedures have even the remotest chance of winning the West’s war with Islam. Expert guests have appeared declaring that almost all Muslims are peaceful followers of the religion of peace, and adding that anyone who questions this increasingly questionable position is a racist, a xenophobe, or an ignoramus. Assorted retired generals and admirals have crawled out of their corporate boardrooms and smugly asserted that if only we would deliver more airstrikes, arm more Kurds, train more of the famous moderate Islamist insurgents, or deploy more Special Forces the war would be won lickety split. And, as always, there has been the usual crowd of greedy academics who arrogantly guaranteed that, with their own great brains and a few hundred million dollars in taxpayer money, they would deradicalize the entire Muslim world and instruct them on how to interpret the Koran. If this sounds familiar, it is because the media have presented the same package of rank nonsense after nearly very post-9/11 Islamist attack.
Accompanying this parade of quackery was yet another iteration of the “Princess Diana Death Festival,” which — in the case of Islamist victories — is a slobberingly repulsive exercise of “showing” that you care when you really will never do anything to tell the truth or support a leader who tries to win the war. The steps in meeting this festival’s requirements include: reporters, experts, politicians, and generals thoroughly salting their statements with the terms “carnage,” “horrendous,” “cowardly attack,” “shocking tragedy,” and that all-time favorite “horrific;” well-scripted politicians calling for “more intelligence sharing,” a “cooperative anti-radicalism effort by the International Community,” and asserting that “this is not a war” and “most Muslims support the West;” candlelight vigils by the seemingly endless number of selfie-taking, drug-addled, and clearly brain-dead millennials; and the construction of soon-to-be garbage piles consisting of candles, flowers, hand-written messages, photographs, and a few people taking shifts to stand or kneel around this refuse and appear to be grieving mightily for people they did not know and only care about because their corpses allow for this mawkishly inane, media-covered ritual.
All of the foregoing is very civilized, moderate, and nauseating, and none of it is worth a horse’s ass. The Islamists started this war in 1996 and on Labor Day this year we will have just begun its third decade. Their motivation to start the war lay in three factors: (a) oppressive rule by Arab tyrants supported, protected, and kept in power by the United States and Europe; (b) repeated, U.S.-led Western military and economic interventions in the Muslim word; and (c) U.S., European, and — implicitly — Arab tyrant support, protection, and coddling of Israel. Today, the Islamists continue to be motivated by the same factors, as well as by the additional U.S.-EU political/social interventionism in the form of democracy mongering and attempts at feminization in the Muslim world that have flourished, deepened, and spread the war under Obama and Hillary Clinton. As a result of the West’s daft and self-defeating interventionist consistency, the Islamists continue to be motivated by the same factors and have continued expanding and winning the war they started. And with a touch of splendid tit-for-tat irony, they are seeing how the U.S. and the EU like military intervention, trying out their own hand at it in places like London, Madrid, Paris, Fort Hood, Washington, DC, San Bernardino, New York, and, now, Brussels.
Obviously, nothing the West has done against the Islamists has done more than deal them a few tactical defeats and provide us with a body count. Nothing currently being discussed by Western governments in public seems to hold a chance for any greater success, although they certainly will drive the West deeper into debt, further shred the social cohesion of its societies, kill many more of its civilians and soldier-children, and inevitably further constrict civil liberties and open the door wider to more tyrannical government.
The West’s lethal Islamist problem has been wrought by two factors. The first is the war the Islamist started and are waging and winning against the United States and Europe. The second is the multiple generations of clearly ill-educated theorists who have ruled the United States and Europe. These men and women have emasculated their societies, hollowed out their militaries by cutting funding, never pursuing victory, and making them a testing ground for institutionalizing sexual deviancy, and showing a vast preference for building authoritarian and so liberty-killing central governments rather than either halting their war-causing interventionism or killing the millions of Islamists and their supporters who need to be killed if they continue intervening.
For American and European citizens, then, it is increasingly difficult to identify the greater enemy, the Islamists who kill them or the self-centered, arrogant elite that rules them and allows the Islamists to kill them. How this predicament will resolve itself is hard to tell. For the most part — I have read — Europe’s citizens are unarmed and so it seems they will have to watch their societies, traditions, and history be consumed by a combination of the urban guerrilla war the Islamists have already started and the feckless policies of their unmanly governments which both fuel that war and lack the ruthlessness to win it. They will be unable to defend themselves by killing either enemy. In America, however, the 2nd Amendment — and the vastly better armed citizenry it has allowed to grow in response to Obama’s tyranny — still ensures that the citizenry can, if they so choose, defend themselves against the Islamists, the national government, or perhaps both.
